We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web. I dont trust my country, the EU and definitely not Instagram, Twitter etc. to implement this in way where my personal data won’t be shared with anyone. But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl. You could reduce a massive amount of bots which would reduce fake news and be a time saver for mods.
As a solution for the privacy issue, I searched for open source passport verification tools and found ZKPassport which makes the proof on you own device without sending you data anywhere. It generates a deterministic Id which is salted and hashed, so you can’t find a real person from a user account or otherwise. Only this Id is sent to the server as a proof, nothing else. The code is open source and its possible to self host the backend for this system.
I try to implement ZKPassport into a lemmy fork to make a small proof of concept for this idea. Of course this needs a lot more security features for a real production scenario, because mods and server owners have much more power and the federation is more complicated with only a few servers that have passport auth enabled and some even have their own implementation of the auth.
So if the proof of concept works out well the question is, would people be rather use passport authenticated Fediverse instances when all of you data stays on your phone?
EDIT: I don’t suggest that the whole fediverse switches to passport authentication, every instance can decide on their own. Therefore you could also have multiple accounts across multiple instances but not multiple accounts on the same instance.
No it wouldn’t be awesome, it would be fucking awful. Admins and mods don’t need more impact than they already have which is just cleaning up their own instances and communities without having any impact on someone doing things elsewhere. That is the whole point of federation and not replicating the centralized one account per person approach that reddit and similar corporate implementations have.
I don’t suggest to implement this into every server and platform like the EU wants. But I think it would be nice to have some servers or a platform where you can be sure, that you are not just beeing manipulated by bots and trolls
Multiple identities is a completely orthogonal problem to bots and trolls. Your lack of understanding of the privacy and security concerns in this is rather troubling if you also furthermore go around saying that you are making an implementation. Is this vibecoded? Have you mathematically proven that the ID information can not be possibly reversed? Can the user selfhost the authentication backend or is the instance in control of it? (or worse, a third-party)
First of all, I am not implementing the security stuff by myself, ZKPassport did this already, its open source everyone can look at the code. Its using a secure hash function, like basically all security relevant apps do, it has been proven years ago.
I just build a bridge between two existing open source tools ZKPassport and Lemmy, everyone can do this, everyone can look at the code I wrote in the end. I am not going to vibecode this and if I would, you would see it.
Everything is open source, you can self host all of that on the server where the lemmy instance runs. The only thing you need externally are the keys from the governments, but in theory you could download them once to your server and never query anything externally after that
Bots and trolls are a very different thing than a human having multiple accounts.
Even if creating an account was limited to a single individual human, they could still run it with a bot full time or partially. Or they could get the identities of people not on the fediverse to set up bot accounts. Trolling rarely includes creating multiple accounts, and they would have the same options to create accounts for people not on the fediverse.
This approach won’t results in platform where you aren’t being manipulated by bots and trolls, but would make things worse for everyone else.
When mods ban a user because they just run a bot on it, they can never post on the server again as long as the ban is active, because they can’t login into the account anymore and need a new identity to create a new account.
Which brings us to your second point: you need a valid identity (to be precise a valid passport with nfc chip which contains a private key only your country knows), which is possible to get but a lot of effort to just create a account which probably gets banned after a few days again.